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Hard Charging: PSP Battery Life

Now that the PlayStation Portable is here, we can see exactly what it is that Sony has created with its new machine: the machine is a monster when it comes to raw polygon crushing abilities, but does this power require mega-watt power to keep it alive?

As many who have been keeping up with IGN's Battery Journal have seen, the PlayStation Portable's general use weighs in typically somewhere between the estimations Sony offered at TGS 2004 of around 4-6 hours of playtime (cut down from the E3 estimation of a maximum of 10 hours.) But we so far have been using the PSP for general use, mixing formats and trying different features while we previewed and played with the system. For exact results on what it is that drains the PSP's battery the most, we've gone back over most of the system's features and put the handheld through intensive tests to drain its power in very specific ways. We've designed unique circumstances to isolate specific features of the unit and see what it is that takes the most out of its runtime, as well as experimented with different features to find out how battery life might be maximized by players or even stretched out by clever game developers.

The first test was to put the hardest-running PlayStation Portable game to the test, and for this test, Namco's Ridge Racers was the obvious choice. With its next-generation visuals running at 60FPS and featuring advanced effects such as specular and environment mapping, detailed geometry and large-scale tracks, and high resolution audio effects, the game is considered to be the most advanced demonstration of the handheld system's power.

And with that, the assumption is that the game is also the most taxing on the system's battery life. Early tests of the game against other PSP titles have upheld this assumption, with the title running on the low end of Sony's 4-6 hour approximation of the PSP's general battery life.

To test this game, we wanted to isolate the graphics engine from the rest of the system. Our goal was to determine how much of the PSP was being used to create the advanced graphics, versus how much the rest of the machine's components were putting a drain on the hardware. If those effects, at this resolution, at this framerate, are the ideal of what next-gen consumers will want to see out of this portable system as much as possible, how much juice does it take to create this kind of visual power?

For this test, we aimed to take two key elements out of the picture: the UMD and the WiFi functionality. Everything else about the game was run at maximum setting for the optimal next-gen experience: the brightness of the system's centerpiece screen was turned up to the maximum battery-powered brightness (there is one more step of brightness available on the unit when played with the AC Adaptor), and the speakers were used instead of headphones, with the sound blaring at full volume. We were not able to isolate the UMD entirely, as this particular game still requires the disc to be spinning at a general speed for the music (a test may be possible later without the UMD -- Ridge Racers loads the entire game and track data into RAM, and can be played after the disc has been ejected until it requires another stage to load -- but since no game runs entirely without the UMD yet and since music volume was required for the test, these results are effective for what we were aiming for in testing Ridge Racers as a pure visual and aural showcase for PSP.) However, we were able to avoid the heavy loads and intermittent downtime of the graphics engine for load screens. The results are an approximation of how hard a top-performance game, working all by itself in a dedicated gameplay environment, will tax the handheld.

For this test, we loaded and ran a race of Ridge Racers on a PSP on AC power, then switched to battery power for the game's engine-run "Replay" mode. This mode takes some of the hardware processing off of the system (AI is pre-computed from a set track rather than reactionary AI based on player input), but most of the in-game calculations of the running game are still put to the test here, and with the constantly changing camera moving through the effects-heavy environments, the machine is still being run pedal to the metal (we ran another Ridge Racers test utilizing another method, but the graphics engine is not as taxed with this method, as we will explain later.)

In this first PSP battery test, Ridge Racers for PSP was switched into Battery mode at 7:19PM, and was heard and seen to be dead that night at 10:51PM...

Hard Performance Test

FINAL RESULTS:
3 hours, 32 minutes

Initially, we intended to compare the high-performance run of Ridge Racers against one of the less processor-intensive games for the system, using similar criteria. Unfortunately, the current crop of games isn't ideal for this kind of test -- there is no "Attract Mode" that would work in a Mah-Jong game, and the majority of lesser-performance game titles so far do not run the machine in any great capacity without user input, which would also require occasional loading and other irregular testing situations with undetermined variables depending on how hard we played (and since we have not yet had the time to set aside multiple hours just to play a Mah-Jong game or not play Ridge Racers at least a little bit, we're pretending that there is scientific criteria behind not completing this test.)

However, in searching for a game that would test against the performance levels of Ridge Racers, we did find a mode in one low-intensity game that taxed a key element of the system that we had isolated out of the RR test. That element is the UMD, which puts demands on the portable system that many expected prior to the PSP's release to have significantly impact on the system's battery life. The disc introduces a moving part (several, if you include the adjusting laser) not usually included in handhelds, and while the UMD offers an enviable large-capacity storage medium in a small package, the downside is how much power it takes to run the disc. In fact, Sony has designed the PSP specifically to minimize UMD loads, and has asked developers to avoid heavy use of the disc.

The "Attract Mode", or demo mode with in-engine samples of gameplay, in the 2D fighter Vampire Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (aka the Darkstalkers revival) seems to avoid this advice. Alternating between the title screen and gameplay every 20 seconds, with a short introduction video sometimes interjected, and always requiring a load in between sequences, this game starts and stops the UMD at a nearly constant rate.

(And by the by, why is it that this game can't cache the menu? A version of this same game was crammed into the 2MB of RAM on the original PlayStation with a somewhat negligible loss of animation frames, but with modern audio compression techniques and 16 times the memory, everything still has to be loaded stage by stage? Man, we'll be glad when we're past the launch period software rushing...)

For this test, we switched to headphones instead of speakers (and for the majority of tests from here on out, will use headphones instead of speakers -- the volume will still always be set to blaring, but this will help save some punches in the back of the head from agitated fellow editors and roomates.) Brightness was still set at max, and WiFi was not turned on. The game's opening "Attract Mode" was run until the game ran out of juice.

In this PSP UMD battery test, Darkstalkers Chronicle for PSP was switched into Battery mode at 10:40AM, and was heard and seen to be dead later in the afternoon at 3:49PM...

Heavy UMD Gameplay Test

FINAL RESULTS:
5 hours, 9 minutes

One of the most unassuming features of the PlayStation Portable is its Sleep Mode. Essentially just a quick nap feature for the PSP while players have to put the unit down, the Sleep mode switches off the UMD, the LCD screen, the audio outputs (both speaker and headphone), the WiFi and other hardware accessory components, and the gameplay engine as the unit goes into a hibernation mode. Nintendo included a similar feature with its new DS system -- simply snap the lid shut, and the system is down to just minimum life support (both machines also have the ability to completely switch off the system instead of going into sleep mode.) The question with the PlayStation Portable is, how effective is that sleep mode? A hidden sleep mode was included in the GBA for keeping special downloaded files in memory (such as the GBA-Link versions of Nintendo Puzzle Collection games), but it proved too unwieldy and unknown for normal use, and although the Nintendo DS features a similar mode, it's usually easier for long periods of down time to just hit the power button.

With the PSP, that sleep mode may come in particularly handy. With the need for the UMD to load the initial code on start-up, avoiding this load would be ideal to get players into the game as fast as possible. And like the PlayStation 2's red/green light for standby mode, the PSP's power switch design attempts to drop players most often into a hibernation mode instead of having the machine completely power down, with the option to switch off completely if need be for long periods in between play. As many who have seen inexperienced PS2 players look baffled at the red light still being on until they eventually reach for the power switch on the back, this design of the PSP will lead many players to leave their systems in Sleep mode since they might not know how to fully power down the handheld. Is this a bad thing, or is this part of the design?

Our initial guess here was that Sleep mode was not going to be a good thing for PSP. When players flip the switch on a PSP in sleep mode, it takes less than a second for the PSP to kick on at full brightness, with the sound pumping, in the middle of gameplay (we've even used Sleep mode in the middle of a Ridge Racers run, and when you power back on, you're still running at full speed and in the thick of the pack, with only a second or so of difference since the game engine is running while the screen and input systems are powering up and down.) The UMD spins up as soon as it can, but as far as gameplay goes, once you're out of sleep mode, you're in the game. PCs and laptops use hibernation mode in Windows, and they take a considerable length of time to start up; PDAs also use Sleep mode and can stay in this state for extended periods of time, but even without moving parts, they often take a while to boot back up, and may sometimes have to revert back to the main menu once pulling out of this standby feature.

With instant access, we were concerned that Sleep mode would keep too much of the PSP chipset 'hot' in the idling Sleep mode to maintain any useful purpose. For this test, we ran a PSP game (in this case, the puzzler Lumines) through the initial load and menu, then switched into Battery mode from the AC adaptor and flipped the power button for Sleep mode. Our intention was to catch the PSP in a dead state after a given period of sleep -- we left the unit on overnight for a period of 8 hours, then ran periodic checks once an hour, approximately on the hour (except for one period of about 3 hours where we did not check the unit at all ... we had to go shopping, and didn't want some store clerk to interrupt our test if we had beeped walking through those annoying security gates and they had found the system in our pockets -- this is science, not show-and-tell.) For the checks, we powered the unit up for about a minute to let the machine start back up and continue running, before switching it back into Sleep mode after being sure that the unit was not dead at the time.

Our results gave us a pleasant surprise -- these checks continued on for a full 24 hour period without the Sleep mode failing to power back up. More unexpectedly, when we finally quit out of the game to go back to the main menu and checked the battery life on the System Info page, the battery indicator had not taken a dent -- the estimation alternated between 99% and 100% battery charge, with an approximated 5:29 left for general use (the battery life indicator seems to make a generalization based either on how much you have been using the system so far or what game you have loaded -- we've seen the indicator read about 3 hours of life after playing Ridge Racers for a while, and just under 6 hours after a few sessions of Lumines). To fully confirm these results, we then went back -- all while still in Battery mode -- into Lumines for another uninterrupted hour-long play session, and found the battery at 86% after all of this sleeping and an hour of the game.

Again, in this PSP battery test, the PSP was switched into Battery mode at 12:00 midnight on Friday, and was put through hour-long checks all through to 12:00 midnight Sunday...

Sleep Mode Test

FINAL RESULTS:
Negligible Battery Impact Over 24 hours

Wireless multiplayer gaming is one of the big reasons why people are paying renewed attention to handhelds with this newest crop of portables -- with the cords cut, the connectivity easier than ever, and even the possibility to play anyone on the globe with online play, gamers are seeing the multiplayer possibilities as something they would really like to take advantage of. We remember fondly our time spent playing Atari Lynx's California Games or the Game Boy F1 Race with a crowd of people when we were younger and handhelds were the fresh new thing, but we also can clearly recall trying to rally up gamers to join us in sessions of killer GBA or NGPC multiplayer games and having everybody flake out while we were still wrangling the cords. Modern handhelds are working to take much of that stress out of the picture and get crowds of people gaming again.

Of course, this leap in functionality has taken some advances in hardware, and modern methods of handheld multiplayer can put a strain on a game console. The PlayStation Portable runs on the advanced 802.11 protocol, which is known for being a drain on handheld units. Particularly with the advanced physics and exact details that need to be relayed between systems on a system like the PSP, multiplayer can eat up a chunk of your battery.

We tested to see how big a bite PSP's multiplayer functionality ate out of the unit's battery life by running our game of choice, Ridge Racers, in WiFi mode (ad-hoc, or local WiFi - there are currently no games that officially support Intranet mode for connecting to the web, and while there are tunnel apps to unofficially connect PSP to other players online, this mode still uses standard local WiFi features to do so and, aside from more error checking needed due to the later data packets, there is not much in tunneled online gameplay that is significantly different from standard WiFi play.)

The set-up for this test was made to be as close as possible to our previous test with Ridge Racers -- the volume was left at max on speakers, the brightness was cranked to maximum battery power, the test was not begun until after the game was loaded on both systems, and the games ran uninterrupted until the test system shut down of a dead battery. For the test, one system was left on AC Adaptor power, while the other was run on batteries; the host system (multiplayer works like an online game, as one player hosts while others join in the game he has set up) for the WiFi session was the machine running on battery power, and is the same one PSP and battery we used for all battery life tests.

To make sure that the PSP's graphic chipset was taxed for this test, we taped down the accelerator button on both systems and had the two PSPs run the track backwards. This made sure that the WiFi signals were being constantly refreshed, and the visuals were still running the gamut of Ridge Racers' effects properties (the cars have a tendency to stick to the sides instead of bump along the track, so visual detail was not being pushed quite as hard as in the first test, but we did make sure to occasionally steer one car or the other away from a wall for some new scenery, and with the behind-the-car view chosen on the battery test system on these tracks, that's still some processor muscle running at 60FPS.) This particular WiFi test used only two systems instead of the Ridge Racers max of eight, and there were no ghost racers or AI opponents to add to the mix. One quick note: Ridge Racers allows a maximum of one hour for any given track (that's a lot of 9's in the lap counter...) before it times out and goes to the main menu or next track, so a total of three course changes (with UMD load) are factored into this test.

In this PSP WiFi test, Ridge Racers for PSP was switched into Battery mode at 2:10PM, and was heard and seen to be dead later in the evening at 4:56PM...

WiFi Multiplayer Test

FINAL RESULTS:
2 hours, 46 minutes

For this to happen -- that PSP becomes a part of its owner's daily life --the battery life of the handheld is a critical factor. MP3 playback is the biggest expected use of the system -- even for players who mostly buy it for games, the occasional music track will be tossed on the memory card for when they're not gaming. The music playback feature of the PSP is naturally the least battery-intensive feature of the unit -- except for the initial Music mode start-up and occasional track selection (which can also be accomplished with a PSP remote control unit, such as the one included in the Japanese Value Pack), there is no need for the screen to be operating, and there is little work for the system's processors to do with the relatively simple compressed audio tracks. A maximum battery life of 8 hours was quoted by SCE back at E3 2004 for music playback (Sony has not addressed the feature since), but that figure was assumed to be judged on UMD music playback -- the PSP can also play music off of a Memory Stick, and without moving parts or a laser needed to access the files on a Stick, hopes were high that homespun music tracks would last much longer than purchased UMD Music releases.

Currently, there are no UMD Music releases to compare (the official PSP demo disc includes music samples, but all are played with music videos instead of straight audio. Curiously, this seems to be a common feature of the UMD Music format -- Music and Movie files run right in the XMB menu, while the Games clips must load up a separate engine-based menu.) We have been able, on the other hand, to put a number of MP3 tracks onto the PSP Memory Stick and test out the runtime of music playback. For this test, we used a few albums worth of songs and set the PSP to repeat the tracks. For most of the test, the PSP ran the same album on repeat (the new Cake album, "Pressure Chief", which has less of that tall trucks feeling but still feels right at home), but after an extended play of about nine hours, we switched from single album repeat to full group repeat of our entire collection (partially because we wanted to test that the PSP would not instantly die if we switched the screen on after prolonged play, and also partially because a visitor begged us to check out the system while we were conducting our test ... she was impressed, but decided that the system looked like bad idea for her young kid.)

As we alluded to earlier, the PSP's screen was the chief component to be taken out of the picture with this test. For the MP3 playback test, we tested music playback only with the running MP3 function -- we switched on the PSP, went into the MP3 mode, configured the tracks and repeat mode, and switched off the PSP's screen (by holding down the screen button until it went black) all before we pulled the plug for Battery mode and started the clock. The PSP's screen switch is a little curious -- in UMD Movie playback, the playing video actually runs the video from memory at high speed until the audio synchs up if you jump in and out of a screen power-down, similar to how some DVD player will roll the video cache through quickly to find the synch -- but we're guessing that video signal is not being processed when the screen is off, and the picture is not just running with the backlight deactivated (the PSP uses a TFT LCD screen, similar to flat-panel computer or television displays.) Our goal was to measure just how much music the PSP can play before it is out of juice.

In this PSP MP3 test, our PSP was switched into Battery mode while playing music files off of the Memory Stick at 1:38AM, and was heard to be dead the next day at 12:17PM...

MP3 Playback (Memory Stick) Test

FINAL RESULTS:
10 hours, 39 minutes

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